


Quarantine with Hal and Jack

by likethenight



Series: Writers' Month 2020 [2]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Children, Cute Kids, Established Relationship, Fluff, M/M, Musicians, Quarantine, lockdown - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-02
Updated: 2020-08-13
Packaged: 2021-03-05 21:46:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,822
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25672297
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/likethenight/pseuds/likethenight
Summary: Jack is not coping as well with the covid-19 lockdown as Hal had thought he might. Luckily, Hal has an idea for something to take his mind off it. (not that, get your mind out of the gutter :D )Chapter 1: ficlet written for Writers' Month 2020, day 2, prompt "quarantine".Chapter 2: ficlet written for Writers' Month 2020, day 13, prompt "music".
Relationships: Hal Peacock (Original Character)/Jack Outlaw | Jack McQueen (Original Character), Original Male Character/Original Male Character
Series: Writers' Month 2020 [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1867720
Kudos: 1
Collections: Writer's Month 2020





	1. Quarantine

**Author's Note:**

> Hal and Jack are the main characters from a novel I've been writing for a very long time entitled _Two of a Kind_. They are both ex-street-kid musicians who spend the course of the novel very slowly realising that they are actually everything in the world to each other (they are the archetypal slow-burn idiots in love). Hal has a daughter, Natalie, who lives with her mother Anita. Jack is - well. Jack is hard to explain but he is very damaged, very unsocialised, and also incredibly grumpy; meanwhile Hal is much calmer, but still rather damaged. They each play guitar in bands, Hal in one and Jack in another. By the point that this ficlet takes place, they have been living together in an established relationship for some time, and Hal has finagled Jack into taking Natalie to the crochet club hosted by Hal's grandmother, at which all Hal's grandmother's friends promptly adopted Jack as an honorary grandson, much to his bewilderment. 
> 
> There will be more ficlets featuring these two during the month!

Jack is pacing about the flat, muttering to himself, and I glance up from the Skype call I’m having with Natalie, trying to hear her reading - she’s at home with Anita, but I’m trying to help with the homeschooling, not that I know much about anything. 

“Hold on a second, baby girl,” I tell her as Jack’s grumbling begins to get louder, and mute my microphone. “What’s up?” I ask him, and he stops in his tracks.

“What?” he snaps, frowning. “I’m on a call.”

“Oh. Sorry. I didn’t realise.” Now that I’m looking closer I realise that he has his earbuds in, his phone in his hand, but I’m still confused - he never calls any of his clients, preferring to conduct all his business by email. “Wait, a call?” 

He stabs a finger at the screen of his phone and pops one earbud out. “A call. They insisted. Apparently that’s how they’re doing things with all their contractors at the moment. Driving me fucking insane.” He makes a frustrated gesture. “I don’t _do_ phones.”

“I know,” I tell him, trying to sound soothing without actually sounding soothing. “I’ll let you get back to it, then you can get it over with.”

Jack rolls his eyes, stabs at his phone again and pops his earbud back in. “Yeah, right, sorry, connection dropped, I’m back now. Look, it works on my machine, if you can’t get it to work on your setup that’s your problem.” And off he goes again, pacing and muttering, although to his credit he does at least take it up the stairs to the balcony over the living area.

I unmute my mic. “Sorry about that, sweetheart,” I tell Natalie. “Uncle Jack was on a phone call, and I didn’t realise it.”

My little girl giggles. “I thought so. He was very loud.” She giggles again. “Papa says a lot of bad words.”

I sigh. “I was hoping you hadn’t heard any of those.” 

“Of course I heard them, daddy. But don’t worry, I won’t say any of them. Not till I’m allll grown up. Anyway, you have to finish listening to my reading.”

“Good point. All right then, sweetheart, off you go.” And Natalie finishes reading the fairy story she’s been set by her teacher via email. Tomorrow I get to do history with her, which will mean her teaching me rather than the other way around. Then again, that’s probably a good way of getting her to understand it, though I’ll probably be on Wikipedia at the same time, making sure she’s grasped it right. 

Later, when Jack has finished his call and apparently solved the problem his client was having, he drops onto the sofa next to me, thumbing through takeaway menus on his phone. “When can we fucking go out again?” he grumbles, and I roll my eyes; he really is not doing well under lockdown, although I’d expected him to revel in not having to leave the flat for any reason whatsoever. 

“I don’t know, and I didn’t know earlier, and I won’t know later, and anyway you’re the one who’s following the news,” I point out gently, drawing him carefully over to rest against my shoulder, my arm around him and my fingers in his hair. 

“Yeah, I know, but I’m going fucking mad in here and I just need to get _out_.”

“We could go for a walk, if you really want to?”

He shakes his head almost violently. “I don’t want a walk. I want a pint in a pub. I want a gig, either playing or watching, I don’t give a shit at this point. I want to - fuck it, I even want to jam with your sodding bloody mates.”

I chuckle. “Now I know it’s getting to you, if you’re offering to jam with us.”

“Oh fuck off, Peacock. I can’t believe you’re doing fine with all this, you’re the fucking sociable one.”

I can’t help a shrug; he’s right there, I am the sociable one of the two of us, but I just can’t quite bring myself to be bothered by not being able to go out for weeks on end. It’s actually quite nice to have a rest.

“Would a jam just with me do?” I venture after a while, and he makes a great show of considering before heaving a long-suffering sigh. 

“I suppose. But seriously, this sucks. I mean, we’re lucky, I can keep working and so can you I guess, but what about everyone who’s depending on the live gigs to put food on the table?”

I raise an eyebrow inwardly - only inwardly, he won’t thank me for drawing attention to how much he’s changed if he’s thinking about people outside his immediate bubble. “I know. We should make some donations, see if there’s any way we can help locally “ An idea comes to me, I’ve seen a few other bands livestreaming gigs, what if we - “We could do a benefit gig, your band and mine, online, I’m sure you can figure out the tech side.”

He opens his mouth to scoff, which, to be fair to him is only deeply-ingrained habit, but clearly thinks better of it. “That’s actually not a bad idea.” He chuckles. “You do realise everyone is going to figure out we’re living together, don’t you?”

“Not necessarily,” I protest, “we have enough space that we could be in different places.” Then I think about it, and I realise that there are more important things right now. “On the other hand, they’d love it if we did a song together. And I think everyone needs a lift right now.”

“My point exactly,” he grins. “Also it’ll give your manager a coronary.”

“He’s not that bad,” I protest for show; our manager Brian is a bit old-school but although I’m sure he’s sussed out me and Jack by now after I brought him as my plus-one to the last band Christmas meal, he’s never shown any sign of having a problem with us. “Anyway, all we have to run past him is the idea for the gig, then we can just get on with it.”

“True. Hey, this way your grandma and all her crochet mafia can experience a gig of ours without actually having to experience a gig of ours.” 

“You know they’ll still want to experience a proper gig when it’s safe,” I grin, it never ceases to amuse me how much my grandmother and her crochet club pals have adopted my spiky, unsocialised boyfriend as their unofficial grandson and tech support hotline, and are determined to see one of his very antisocial punk gigs. We’ve been checking in on them via Skype and Zoom ever since the lockdown was imposed, and as soon as we’re allowed out again we’ll be going over to visit each and every one of them, even if we have to stand in the garden and wave. But a livestreamed gig would be an enormous amount of fun, for us as well as them. 

Jack rolls his eyes, but he’s smiling, and I know he actually really likes my grandmother and her friends. He’ll never admit it directly, but I know their unquestioning acceptance of him is doing him the world of good. Quietly I send a message to my band’s WhatsApp group suggesting a gig, and then I sit back to wait for the replies. I think we might be on to a winner with this idea.


	2. Music

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hal and Jack's respective bands do a double-header livestream gig, with an extra surprise at the end for the fans.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is not my best work, but I'm short of time and inspiration today and it's difficult to get all the exposition in that is required when presenting a scene that happens after the end of an unpublished 180k-word novel! There will be more Hal and Jack soon, and hopefully it'll be a bit more explanatory of who they are and why they are how they are.

The livestream gig went pretty well, all things considered. Brian turned all the organisation over to one of his assistants, who knew far more about the technology than any of us, and we had a whale of a time rehearsing via Zoom. Jack’s band were up for doing a double-header, and the social media accounts for both bands got going on the promotion, so by the time we went live there were a couple of thousand people watching from all over the world - way more than we’d ever have got at one of our actual gigs. 

Jack’s band did their set first, and we set the camera up at the bottom of the stairs so he could sit on the stairs and look cool. Then I did my set from the sofa, and it absolutely looked like we were in two separate houses - except that we’d positioned the camera so that it showed the same staircase just in the corner of the shot, just to give any particularly sharp-eyed viewers a hint at what was to come. 

Which was an ‘encore’ of covers by both bands, and Jack very casually sauntered into shot behind me, came to sit on the sofa next to me and leaned forward to adjust the zoom so that we both fitted into the frame. We couldn’t hear the audience reaction, of course, but all of a sudden the comments pane went absolutely wild, and it took all of our concentration to keep straight faces and not break the impression that all of this was absolutely normal.

We’d discussed it on a rather chaotic Zoom call with both bands; we’ve all been aware for several years that a lot of our fans are fans of both bands, and there’s a subset of them that have been convinced that Jack and I are seeing each other for about as long. They’re not quite right - it’s only been a year or two since we finally got over ourselves, but we’ve known each other for far longer, and we’ve always been that sort of close. Nicky - the singer in my band, and my best friend, other than Jack - squealed with glee when we brought up the idea of Jack making a guest appearance and making it very clear we were locked down together. He’s been following the fan theories for years, and I’m reasonably sure he’s got an undercover account on most if not all of the websites they use, keeping an eye on the gossip and feeding them new titbits every now and then (most of them entirely made up). I wouldn’t put it past him to have been putting comments on the livestream as we were playing.

After we finished, we all fired up another Zoom call as we sat back and unwound and watched the fans going mad with theories. We’d kept it ambiguous, we hadn’t made it overtly clear that we were together - maybe we were just flatmates, the more cautious fans were saying - and I couldn’t help grinning. 

“Think we missed an opportunity there,” I said. “I should’ve kissed you.”

“Fuck off,” said Jack, which to be fair is his knee-jerk default response to pretty much anything. “You should be so lucky.”

So I grabbed him and kissed him soundly in front of all of our friends, instead of the whole internet. He should be grateful for small mercies.

I’m never going to hear the end of it, of course.


End file.
